Tales from the Folly
by drekadair
Summary: A collection of drabbles, one-shots, and miscellaneous moments. Not necessarily connected to one another. Generally Peter and Nightingale-centered, but not necessarily Starlingale. Rated T for now.
1. Shaken

**AN** : This is the start of a collection of various bits and pieces of writing set in the world of the Rivers of London that don't quite lend themselves to a story in their own right. I love the relationship between Peter and Nightingale so a lot of these will explore that, and some, but certainly not all, will be Peter/Nightingale. I hope you enjoy!

 **Shaken**

Nightingale reacts when he learns Peter has traded himself for Nicole Lacey.

* * *

I was actually crossing the Atrium with the keys to Jag in my hand when my cellular phone rang—a cheerful jingle meant to imitate the ring of a real telephone. Peter assured me I could change it to sound like anything I liked, but I didn't have the faintest idea how and I wasn't quite ready ask for his assistance yet. I fished the device out of my jacket pocket and checked the screen, which informed me the caller was "unidentified." I tapped little telephone icon and raised the blasted thing to my ear.

"Hello?"

"DCI Nightingale?" A man's voice, Midlands accent overlain with anxiety.

"This is he."

"This is DC Dominic Croft, out of Leominster—"

Leominster, where Peter was. _Oh, God_ , I thought. _Please not Peter, not him, too_ —

"Constable Grant and I have been working closely together on Operation Manticore," Croft continued, unaware his words were stripping the ground from beneath my feet. "About an hour there was a development." He took a deep breath, obviously bracing himself. "Peter made a hostage exchange with the, uh, fairies responsible for the kidnapping of Nicole Lacey and Hannah Marstowe. He swapped himself for Nicole and the, uh, fairy changeling, and they—the fairies—took him into Pokehouse Wood. He said we should contact you," Croft finished weakly.

I actually swayed slightly and rested my hand against the plinth holding the bust of Newton to steady myself. _Not dead, not dead, not Peter_.

Not yet. A hostage exchange meant Peter was likely still alive, but I couldn't count on that situation to last. And the longer he remained in the clutches of these fae—whoever and whatever they were—the harder it would be to find them.

"Sir?"

I realized I'd been quiet for too long. "I think you'd best tell me everything," I said. "From the beginning."

And he did. I listened with the phone pressed to my ear as I gathered Varvara and Toby and got us all into the Jag. I couldn't leave Varvara alone in the Folly—or anywhere else, for that matter—and I had the idea Toby might be useful in tracking Peter, if it came to that. Bloodhound he was not, but Toby had proved remarkably sensitive to _vestigia_ , and that might come in handy.

I was on the A40 before Croft finished. I told him to continue searching for Peter, to use extreme caution if they located his abductors, and that I would be there as soon as possible. Then I hung up. It wasn't very useful advice, but there was nothing more I could say and anyway I could imagine what Peter would say about me driving and speaking on the phone at the same time. He has very strong opinions on these things, and I prayed he would have many future opportunities to express them to me.

Varvara tried to question me, but after I gave her a few terse non-answers she figured out I wasn't interested in conversation and turned her face to look out the window. That suited me perfectly, as I was lost in thought. Brooding, Peter would no doubt say, though probably not to my face.

The thought brought a stab of pain to my chest. Peter had insinuated himself so smoothly and completely into my life it was impossible to imagine living without him. Which, when I considered it, sounded more like the kind of sentiment expressed by a lovesick schoolgirl than a century-old wizard and police inspector. But there it was: I needed him. Sometimes I suspected I needed him far more than he needed me.

For decades I had allowed myself to molder away in the Folly with no one but Molly for company. After it became clear magic was not going away as we had all believed I had tried to have more contact with my fellow police officers, and of course there was Abdul, but nothing had shaken me from my self-imposed reclusion. Until Peter.

And God, had he shaken me. Beyond the new technological wonders he brought into the Folly's coach house, beyond the modern methods he brought to our policework, he brought a burning curiosity and fierce idealism that made me feel truly alive for the first time in longer than I could remember. He was nothing like the apprentices in the old days, nothing like the officers I'd once had under my command, nothing, in short, like I had expected my apprentice to be—whenever I had imagined having one. And yet, he was everything I could possibly want in an apprentice—smart, tough, brave. Loyal.

A friend.

God, I thought. I had to get him back.


	2. One of Those Conversations

**AN** : Set during The Hanging Tree and contains a few teensy, tiny little spoilers for the same. If you haven't read the book yet, there's no real reason not to read this fic: the spoilers are so non-spoilery I almost didn't bother with a spoiler alert.

 **One of Those Conversations**

Nightingale offers Peter an apology.

* * *

There are some things you do not want to hear your governor say to you, and some conversations that can only happen in a moving vehicle. That I was experiencing both at the same time told you something about the kind of day I was having. We were driving back to Belgravia nick after a truly exhausting few hours in the Empress State Building hashing out the state of Operation Marigold and then getting ambushed by MI5, and I wanted to spend the drive staring out the window and not thinking about anything in particular. Only two days ago I'd barely missed the Faceless Man and had a house collapse on me, so my week as a whole was not going well. This conversation did not seem likely to improve it.

"Peter, I believe I owe you apology."

"Sir?"

Nightingale kept his eyes on the road, apparently focused on driving. "Despite your fast talking back there—that was well done, by the way—Folsom had a fair point."

That was news to me. I tried to remember whether Folsom had said anything over the course of the two-hour meeting that was actually worth something. "He did?"

"You've been placed in an extraordinary number of dangerous situations over the past two and a half years," Nightingale said. "Situations more dangerous than any apprentice should be expected to face."

"I'm not just an apprentice," I pointed out. "I'm also a police constable. It's my job to face dangerous situations."

"Nonetheless. Police constables are not normally exposed to the level of risk to which you have been exposed."

I didn't say anything, because he was right. Most police officers went their entire careers without being almost burned alive, or fighting magical chimaeras, or getting buried under Tube platforms, or jumping off the roof of exploding buildings, or any of the other crazy things that had happened to me since I'd interviewed a ghost at Covent Garden. Or, if I was honest, since DCI Nightingale walked into my life, because if he hadn't requested me for the Punch case I would have gone on to the Case Progression Unit, ghost or no ghost.

"I should never have allowed the Folly to become a department of one," Nightingale continued. "If I had not, there would be more 'Falcon-capable personnel,' as Folsom put it, to protect you from the excessively dangerous aspects of the job while you completed your training."

It was only the third time Nightingale had ever suggested I needed to be protected from anything—the first was from the horrors of the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau, and the second was from the decision to execute Simone and her sisters via paramilitary death squad. Considering that one of those things I definitely did want to be protected from and the other I definitely didn't, I wasn't sure how I felt about this.

"You couldn't know," I offered. "You thought magic was going away. Everyone thought that."

"Sometimes I wonder if I only wanted to think that," Nightingale said softly. "At any rate, by the seventies the evidence to the contrary was incontrovertible. I should have begun training an apprentice or two then."

"I'm glad you didn't," I said honestly. "If you had a couple fully-trained wizards lying around I don't think you'd have been desperate enough to take me on, and I'd be stuck in the CPU right now doing paperwork."

"I doubt you could ever be 'stuck' anywhere for very long," Nightingale said, lightly enough, but it was a compliment and I appreciated it. He didn't hand out a lot of compliments.

We drove in comfortable silence for a few minutes and I thought that was the end of it, but then Nightingale said, "You don't regret it, then? Taking the oath?"

I thought about all the craziness—the exploding buildings, the Faceless Man, almost dying more times than I could count. And about all the people I'd met, Mama Thames and Father Thames, Beverly Brook, even Nightingale himself. And the things I'd learned, _lux_ and _impello_ , revenants and unicorns, heck, even Latin grammar. And I thought about Lesley's beautiful, ruined face.

"No," I said. "I don't regret it."

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Nightingale smile. "I meant what I told Agent Finula," he said. "You are an exceptionally gifted student. And I certainly wasn't desperate."

Two compliments out of Nightingale in one conversation was a little overwhelming. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to him but I didn't know how to say any of them, so I just said, "Thank you, sir."

I thought his smile looked sad, or maybe bittersweet, but I didn't dare look at him to check. We both kept our eyes on the windscreen, because that's one of the unspoken rules of conversations like these, the ones you can only have in a moving vehicle.


End file.
